Beyond Past Lives

A detailed lesson plan for tapping into “the divinity that is already inside of you.”

Kelley’s (Healing Through Past Life Regression...and Beyond, 2012) latest book opens with a foreword by best-selling author and motivational speaker Wayne Dyer attesting to Kelley’s experiences with past-life regression, a semihypnotic state in which a participant feels connected to previous incarnations of his or her soul or essence throughout time. Fans of such past-life regression books as Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters (1988) will find much that’s familiar in Kelley’s book, in which she asserts her belief that it’s possible “to heal your present by working with your past.” She offers readers a 10-chapter series of revelations that she’s learned through her own experiences recalling her past lives. For newcomers to the concept, she begins by defining her terms—the soul, or spiritual essence, of each person; the vaguely godlike “Oversoul” from which all those souls originate; and so forth—before getting down to specific cases, often highlighted by the experiences of clients she’s worked with in her own past-life regression business. But Kelley broadens the more traditional narrative of past-life exploration by taking a page from the playbook of quantum physics and adding parallel lives belonging to an infinite variety of alternate selves. “All of your present experiences are drawn from what was once a possible reality,” she writes, and each person’s decisions cause their immediate realities to shift and realign with new possibilities. Much of this is couched in a comforting blend of quasi-Buddhist contemplativeness and quasi-Christian determinism in which bad things happen for a reason and even personal tragedies are part of an ultimately uplifting design. Everything, from life’s ordinary little disappointments to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is used in examples of how positive perceptions can rescue even the grimmest realities from pointlessness. The book’s utilitarian aims are emphasized by a series of exercises and Q-and-A’s designed to reinforce the main point that people can be masters of their own destinies.

An intriguing blend of reincarnation and the quantum multiverse well-aimed at empowering the spiritual seeker.